President's Message: I Need a Prescription for Elbow Grease, Please!
By Charlie Hall, AIB President
Ed McMahon, who holds
the Charles E. Fraser Chair on Sustainable Development at the Urban Land
Institute in Washington, DC, believes that a place is more than just a location on a map. A place is the unique
collection of qualities and characteristics – visual, cultural, social,
environmental – that provide meaning to a location. Sense of place is what
makes one city or town different from another, but it is also what makes our
physical surroundings worth caring about.
In a recent TED talk,
McMahon sets forth a compelling argument for the economic, psychological and
social value of uniqueness of places. He explains that well-educated workers,
world-class infrastructure, and the ability to turn ideas into commercial
realities are all critically important to economic success of a place, but the
other critical, but often forgotten element is “community distinctiveness.”
“Communities that can’t differentiate themselves,” McMahon observes, “have no
competitive advantage.”
As I listened to Ed’s
talk online, I couldn’t help but think of America in Bloom as one of the best
tools a community can engage in to enhance its competitive advantage. As Marvin
and I have said countless times in this column, a pleasant community appearance
adds to home values, helps attract business investment, and improves
neighborhood reputation. Research shows that the beauty is one of the top three
factors in creating community attachment, or loyalty, to your particular town
or city.
This past week I had
the privilege of meeting with leaders in a community interested in
participating in America in Bloom for the first time and, as usual, they were
feeling a little speculative about where to begin. This community already has a
number of beautification-related efforts underway by several different
non-profit organizations, so they were concerned that support for America in
Bloom would be minimal because they felt the volunteers in their small town
already had a lot on their plate and would not want to take on the task of
yet-another “project.”
In response, I
related to them that America in Bloom is not looking to supplant any existing
efforts or add to the work load of existing volunteers, but instead AIB was a
chance to inventory their already existing efforts (during the development of
their community profile) and then utilize talented AIB volunteers (i.e. our
judges) in helping to evaluate and provide feedback on their current efforts
and help them brainstorm on what could be done in the future to augment their
beautification programs. That really seemed to resonate with this group and I
was glad we had great examples of community profiles and judges reports on our
website to show them!
Now while I said this
community already had a number of beautification efforts underway, when we
first sat down to discuss the AIB registration process, the leaders had not
really inventoried them before and as we started our discussion, more and more
folks began to chime in and remind the group of yet another project that
another group was doing. The excitement among the committee began to mount as
they came to the conclusion: “You know what,
we really are doing a lot of stuff!” That’s when they realized that putting
together their community profile was going to be a lot easier than they had
originally thought. In fact, even though they were a small city the hard part
was going to be fitting it all in the profile!
Still, the committee
felt that there needed to be some type of project or event that could be
initiated in order to gain exposure for their AIB awards program involvement.
One of their committee members then brought up the idea of starting with
cleaning up what they already have in their community. As I said earlier, this
community already has a number of beautification efforts underway by several
different non-profit organizations in some areas of town, but the
neglect in other prominent areas really detracted from the benefit they
were getting. So the city manager and mayor, who also happened to be attending
the meeting, put their full support behind the idea, and they left the meeting
with their game plan in mind and ready to conquer the world.
As I considered this
giant small step for this community, I thought about other communities who
could definitely benefit from a little sprucing up. After all, it’s not always
about establishing some new project or spending a lot of money on new
beautification infrastructure. Sometimes a little elbow grease is all it takes.
Plus, it’s a great way to establish partnerships with other local non-profits
and then, who knows, it may just spark a beautification revolution!
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